Plaza
Place Rapp
Bronze monument to a Napoleonic general, cast as a young sculptor's first public commission.
Location
About this audio guide
This guide to Place Rapp in Colmar follows the twenty-year-old who cast the bronze general watching over this square: Auguste Bartholdi, working from a rented Paris bedroom in eighteen fifty-four on his first public commission. It traces the statue's own strange life, from a Montrouge foundry through Nazi occupation and a postwar restoration. Along the way it takes in the man it depicts, Jean Rapp, a Colmar-born cavalry officer wounded repeatedly at Napoleon's side.
This audio guide was created using AI.